Teach Them to Long for the Sea

From the desk of Benji Welner in Dallas, TX. Neptune's Fortune by Julian Sancton. Finished on July 22, 2026. Rating: ★★★★☆ I can’t recall how I stumbled upon this book. I do know that when I bought it, my dad forwarded me the Amazon receipt and said “I figure you got this?” Which is a fair assumption because this book is sort of perfect for me: Neptune’s Fortune tells the story of one man’s striving for greatness on the sea in the modern era. That description does belie, I suppose, that this is an interpretation of a text with a bit more nuance than my short pitch. Sancton dedicates a fair bit of attention to the question of Roger Dooley’s credibility. Is Dooley a marine archaeologist, who worships at the temple of science and history, or a treasure hunter, seeking to corrupt our shared human heritage for fortune and fame? A journalist, Stanford professor, and friend of Dooley’s provides an apt description, one that I find myself empathizing with quite a bit: Fagen identified an…